Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation. For sixty years, that's how Homer
has begun the "Iliad" in English, in Richmond
Lattimore's faithful translation - the gold standard for
generations of students and general readers. This
long-awaited new edition of Lattimore's "Iliad" is
designed to bring the book into the twenty-first
century-while leaving the poem as firmly rooted in
ancient Greece as ever. Lattimore's elegant, fluent
verses - with their memorably phrased heroic epithets
and remarkable fidelity to the Greek - remain unchanged,
but classicist Richard Martin has added a wealth of
supplementary materials designed to aid new generations
of readers. A new introduction sets the poem in the
wider context of Greek life, warfare, society, and
poetry, while line-by-line notes at the back of the
volume offer explanations of unfamiliar terms,
information about the Greek gods and heroes, and
literary appreciation. A glossary and new maps round out
the book. The result is a volume that actively invites
new readers into Homer's poem, helping them to
understand the worlds in which he and his heroes lived -
and thus enabling them to marvel, as so many have for
centuries, at Hektor and Ajax, Paris and Helen, and the
devastating rage of Achilleus.
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